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Sometimes Smartphones Require Smart Solutions

How to remove the voicemail icon when there are no voicemails on your Android

Submitted by James Bond on Mon, 05/20/2013 - 10:11pm

Has the Voicemail icon on your Android phone been showing a new voicemail notification when there is no new voicemail or any voicemail messages in your inbox? This can be a pretty annoying issue so here are some tips to get your voicemail notifications working correctly again.

Restart your phone

Sometimes we forget that our phones need to rest too. Keeping your phone on indefinitely can cause some funny issues, especially false notifications, so don’t forget to power your phone off every couple of days for a few minutes and let it rest. This will help keep your phone running smoothly.

Double check your voicemail

You have probably done this a hundred times already, but triple check after power cycling (powering off and on) your phone. If your phone is still showing a voicemail message and there is no voicemail waiting in your inbox then proceed to the next step.

Re-enable the voicemail notifications

Disabling and then re-enabling the “show notification” option under the voicemail app settings was a wonderful suggestion submitted by Milton (a site visitor) and I liked this suggestion so much that I felt I needed to add it to this guide as one of the first things to try when troubleshooting the voicemail notification on an Android cell phone.

To access the “Show notifications” setting in your voicemail application you need to access your cell phones Settings, find and open the Application manager (sometimes located under the “More” tab on many Android smartphones), make sure that all of the apps are showing (you may need to scroll over a few pages if the current apps displayed are under the list of “Downloaded” apps), once you see the list of ALL your apps scroll down and find the Voicemail application, tap to open it and then deselect the Show notifications option. You may get a warning letting you know that if you do this then you may miss important alerts for this app. Press Ok which will remove the checkmark and disable this setting; once it’s disabled press the option again to enable it.

Just make sure that “Show notifications” is check marked again as you’ll want to know when you get new voicemail messages.

Then go back to your home page and make sure that your voicemail notification is functioning properly. I suggest leaving a test voicemail and rebooting your cell phone if necessary.

If it solves the problem, enjoy, if not then proceed with the advice below.

Thanks again for the suggestion Milton! Note: Milton’s post can be read HERE.

Clean the App(s)

This might be a small hiccup on the Phone or Voicemail application itself. A quick cleaning can often be very effective at resolving this issue on your Android cell phone. This next suggestion will reset the settings and data on the application(s) and should not cause you to lose any voicemail messages that are stored on your wireless carrier’s server. Note: voicemails should be stored by your wireless service provider and you shouldn’t lose any important voicemails by clearing the phone or voicemail app data.

Start by Clearing your Phone Application

Access your phones Settings (you can do this by going to your phones Home page and then clicking the Menu Key), once your Settings are open find and open the Application manager, scroll to ALL, tap on Phone, and then tap Clear data.

Then check to make sure that your voicemail icon is displaying correctly. If it is then enjoy your smartphone and if this does help to resolve your issue and you would like to show your appreciation then don’t forget to press the Facebook Like and or Google + buttons below this article and feel free to also leave a friendly remark in the comment section at the bottom of this page.

Personal Note: I had forgotten to include this advice in my original post and I want to thank one of my readers by the name of Fred for reminding me of this trick so that I could add it to the article. His comment can be read by clicking HERE. Thanks Fred.

Clear the Voicemail Application

If for some reason clearing the data on your phone app didn’t help then try clearing the Voicemail applications data as well.

To clean your voicemail application the steps are very similar to the ones used when accessing the “Show notifications” feature and when clearing the data on your Phone application. Open your Settings > Application manager > ALL > Voicemail > and then this time tap on the Clear data option.

If your cell phone is still incorrectly displaying the voicemail notification then you can proceed with the additional suggestion(s) listed below.

Leave yourself a voicemail

Sounds a little strange I know, but call yourself and then leave yourself a voicemail. Once you check your voicemail, listen to it, and then erase it. After you have erased the voicemail you just left on your own machine (don’t use visual voicemail to do this) then check and see if your voicemail notification icon is still showing or if it is now working correctly.

Check your applications

If you have a voicemail application that you yourself downloaded onto the phone, try and force stop and/or uninstall that application, restart your phone, and see if your android starts working correctly again.

This also applies to any applications that you might have downloaded around the same time that you noticed this issue. If you downloaded a game, exercise, health, weather or other application and the notification started malfunctioning then chances are high that it could be that application causing problems. Try force stopping or uninstalling the app (I recommend you uninstall the application), rebooting, and see if it is working correctly again.

Factory Data Reset

You might have a software bug or even virus on your device and if you have tried the above suggestions and need a last resort then I strongly recommend you backup all of the information on your phone and then reset its information back to its factory defaults.

Don’t panic! It’s really not as hard as it sounds; the most important thing that you will need to do is to back up and save your information from your phone to another source so that you can put it all back on your phone after the reset.

Contact your wireless service provider

A factory data reset should fix this issue if it is a problem with the device itself, if for some mysterious reason your voicemail icon is still showing a message waiting and there is no message then contact your wireless carrier to have them do some troubleshooting on their end. If they don’t seem to have the solution right away, and you have done ALL the troubleshooting mentioned earlier in this article (especially the factory data reset) then ask them to remove the voicemail feature from your wireless account and then add it back on.

This will erase any saved voicemails that you have stored but your inbox will be like it’s brand new. You might have to setup your password again but your voicemail should be up and running and working correctly. Don’t forget to check it (if you can) while you still have your wireless provider on the phone. If they cannot get it to display properly then they will most likely give you some of the options available when you have problems fixing a phone.

Had this same problem. Clearing data on the "Phone" application worked for me. I also had this problem after installing VZW Visual Voicemail. I think the problem is that I had 3 new messages when I installed the visual voicemail app, which confused the phone. Your wife must not have had any unread vm's, thus not creating the problem for her. So, word of advice - make sure you have no new vm's before installing the visual voicemail app!

I am glad that it worked for you John. Thank you for taking the time to leave a comment and letting others know what steps you were able to use to get the voice mail indicator on your cell phones screen to go away.

Yay! Thanks! It worked!!! I finally got rid of the voice mail indicator on my screen. calling my phone, leaving a voice mail, then deleting the voice mail, removed the voice mail notification. It drove me crazy... every time I powered on my phone, it indicated I had a new voice mail.

I am happy to hear that this guide was able to help you remove that annoying voicemail notification from displaying on your cell phone and I want to thank you for taking the time to leave such a friendly comment and showing your appreciation. I am always grateful for positive feedback.

I suppose that would remove the voicemail notification icon from showing. Maybe even get it unstuck for good. Terrific suggestion Milton, I think I might just add it to the article.

Just make sure to “re-click” and enable it though. If you leave it off you won’t know if you get any new voicemails.

You also bring up a good point about the application manager as well; I have been meaning to update the article above and suggest that you can try clearing the Voicemail Cache and Voicemail Data which could also help to fix it.

Thanks for contributing to the site Milton and providing the wonderful suggestion.

All you have to do is go into the applications menu, select voicemail, then select force stop. I have had to clear mine on a few different occassions, and this works EVERY time. No clearing the vm or hard resets are required!

I was about to comment the exact same thing since my phone language is set to Spanish and I didn't find the voicemail app in the apps manager, I just swiped the notification bar and held the icon and then tapped the app info, forced it to stop and cleared the cache and voilá! problem solved! Thanks to the author for such a useful article! :)

I'd disabled voicemail, having never used nor checked it for years, but still had a voicemail notification on my phone for a month. Restarting my phone hadn't fixed it, and neither had removing and reinserting my SIM card. After reading this article I went looking for the option to turn off the notifications. I've got a Samsung Galaxy S4, and found that the notification was coming from the "Phone" app but I wasn't able to disable notifications from it. However, when I pressed the "Force Stop" button the notification disappeared. The phone still seems to work just fine, so I'm hoping the notification doesn't come back.

I had this annoying icon for a few weeks, without having any voice mail. I tried many things including factory resetting my Note 2. Nothing worked. Then I decided to call me myself and left a message. Then I followed the normal procedures and in seconds, that stupid little icon was gone. Hope this will help somebody.

I am happy to hear that leaving a message on your own voicemail worked for you as well.

Out of curiosity… Leaving yourself a voicemail is the fifth suggestion listed in the article above and has been part of this guide since it was first written.

Marcos (and Roberto) did you end up having to do something different then what was described in the article above or was that section of the article accidently skipped? I am just curious if I need to go back and edit the article in order to make the suggestion easier to follow or if I need to add anything to make the suggestion more effective when fixing the voicemail icon on a cell phone.

I’m just wondering. Thanks for taking the time to post a comment and I hope to hear back from you soon should you have any suggestions on how the article above can be improved. Otherwise enjoy your properly working voicemail notification.

I had this same problem. The voice mail icon would not go away. I called myself from another phone, left a voice mail, then accessed it from my phone. I deleted the voice mail, then used the prompt to disconnect instead of just hanging up. The icon disappeared.